What Will Waking Up at 5 AM Every Day Change in My Life?

If you are on the right path, it will always be uphill

At no point in my life have I liked working during the day. Beyond the rush of daily life, the deadlines to meet, the bills to pay, I’ve always chased different thrills, different experiences. I was in my early twenties when I discovered that this limited unit of time we call life passes faster the longer its stretch becomes. I know what Teoman means in his song “Paramparça” (“Shattered”) with the line “While time just won’t pass, years, lives pass by.”

One day I decided to sit down and put everything I’d done so far on a sheet of paper. Even though there were many projects, from the startup I laid the foundations of during university to a video content project, when I looked back I saw work that made me proud, and just as much work I was ashamed of, things I started with enthusiasm and never saw through to the end.

I believe a person’s biggest race is the one they run against themselves. If you managed to take one more step than yesterday, if you managed to add even one more line to a piece of writing than yesterday, then you’re on the right path.

“If you are on the right path, it will always be uphill,” says Henry Eyring. The “comfort zone” is perhaps a person’s greatest enemy. Once you get hooked on comfort, once you get used to waking up late or spending hours in front of a game console, it isn’t easy to break your chains and escape that zone.

So what could I do? What could I do to be more productive?

I sat down and drew my daily routines on a sheet of paper. I was getting up at 7:20 every day and getting home at 18:30 in the evening. After taking care of my basic needs until 21:00, I’d work until 23:00, and then, after spending two completely dead hours, I’d move into the sleep phase around 01:00. So 23:00–01:00 was completely dead time for me. 14 hours a week, 60 a month, and a full 730 hours a year, in other words a whole month.

One month of the year: idle time that means nothing and produces nothing.

The hardest part, I think, is taking the first step. We Turks are people who like to build the plane while flying it. My first goal was to channel the time between 23 and 01 into waking up early. For the past week, I’ve been going to bed at 23:00 and waking up at 05:00 every day. Those who follow my Instagram account will have seen it in my pointless “Stories.” As someone who loves sleeping as much as living, even though this process feels like torture, I know that the foundation of every habit is laid with rituals you do unwillingly. After spending the first few mornings on pointless YouTube videos, I’m continuing my war with sleep on a more systematic and disciplined schedule.

So what do I expect or aim for from this process?

There’s no clear answer to that yet. I want to do better-quality work, read more, write more, listen to more music, do my job better, that’s all. What we call life is nothing but the opportunity cost of the things we put off. It’s no more than a bittersweet reflection of the step we didn’t take, the line we didn’t write, the flavors we didn’t taste, the cities we didn’t go to.

My war here isn’t a cycle to be reduced to just waking up early in the morning; it’s with the rituals that daily life brings. I hope what I write, what I’ll do, or my failures give hope to someone who wants to become a better person. I hope our numbers keep growing on this journey.

If you also wake up at 05:00 in the morning for a purpose, don’t forget to tag me in your posts. Who knows, maybe our paths will cross one day.

If you’d like to follow my journey: Instagram.com/marketingholmes

You can also follow me on Twitter: @MarketingHolmes